The late Carlo Greco is something of a legend among Guild
fans. He started working at Guild’s factory in Hoboken in 1959; four years
later, he was put in charge of production, making him one of the chief
architects of Guild guitars for the next decade and a half. He stayed with Guild
through their move to Westerly, leaving the company in 1977 to build instruments
on his own in New York City. While his subsequent output shows a personal touch
– he seemed to like fancy ornamentation in all its forms – Greco’s hand-made
work from the last few decades shows a very strong resemblance to Guild products
from his tenure.

This archtop guitar is an excellent example. Strip away
all that checkered binding and you find a rather unusual design: a carved-top
acoustic archtop modified for electric playing without the use of conventional
floating pickups. Instead, the top has two oval soundholes through which the
pickups protrude. The pickups are mounted on a rod suspended between the neck
and tail blocks so as to minimize the dampening of acoustic vibrations. It’s a
strange but successful approach that actually dates back to the Guild
George Barnes Acousti-Lectric models of
the 1960s. Barnes himself came up with the concept as a way to combat feedback;
whether it does that is questionable, but it’s hard to argue with the resulting
tone. The controls were all suspended on a pickguard so that nothing would
interfere with the vibration of the top.

Few Acousti-Lectrics were built – one sources says less
than a dozen – but apparently someone commissioned Carlo Greco to revive the
design. There are a number of differences between this guitar and the old Guild
model: the larger sound holes, the binding, the headstock, the tailpiece, the
second toggle switch… but the body shape is nearly identical to all of Guild’s
17” archtops from the early ‘60s onward. The oval soundholes recall a number of
one-off Guild archtops built in the ‘60s, including an ornate one for Merle
Travis. Greco continued to build guitars until 2011, and commissioning an
instrument from him must have been the closest possible experience to finding a
time machine and ordering a customized guitar from Guild in the ‘60s. Greco
signed the underside of the top in October, 1982,
and the serial appears to indicate that the guitar was completed in 1983.

The high-output DiMarzio humbuckers have a very different
sound from the classic Guild anti-hum pickups of the ‘60s, but the guitar has a
thick tone that works for a range of styles. The second toggle switch is a coil
tap for the bridge pickup, which gives it a thinner sound when engaged.
Unplugged, the guitar has a loud voice with a surprising amount of bass
considering it’s strung with medium-gauge nickel strings. The feel of the guitar
is very similar to a Guild X-500 (no surprise
there), with a similarly wide and thin profile and large frets. The guitar has
survived in remarkably clean condition, with minimal wear all around and no
damage or repairs to note.